A Montreal-based contact centre software provider has landed its first customer south of the border, which includes supporting new operations in Florida.

Quovim C3, which offers contact centre software, as well as multi-channel communications solutions and consulting services, has taken over SatCom’s Interactive Intelligence Customer Interaction Centre (CIC) platform support and maintenance contract as it rapidly expands its business.

“The nature of their business is quite dynamic,” said Joe Bigio, Quovim C3’s executive vice-president and co-founder, who is leading the company’s expansion south of the border. “They have to react really fast to customer demands.”

SatCom has about 200 contact centre agents in Brooklyn Park, MN, and is primarily engaged in outbound campaigns on behalf of clients in the cable and broadband industry, which includes handling overflow for its customers, said Bigio. “All of sudden they could be hit by extra calls.”

SatCom’s existing CIC implementation, which has been in place for the last two years, leverages modules including Dialer, Call Scripter, IMC and Recorder, but it was experiencing challenges with support. It was taking too long to resolve system performance issues, said Bigio. “They can’t really wait for things to get resolved.”

He said Quovim began its relationship by going onsite to resolve the pressing issues, and is now planning the implementation of other features such as including interactive voice response, skill-based routing and staging.

Bigio said Quovim already has other U.S. clients in the pipeline in Washington State, as well as an established Canadian customer base in Ontario and Quebec, and while some Canadian companies struggle to expand into the U.S. market, he said ultimately what lands new customers for Quovim is personalize service: “How quickly can we get there?”

Customers south of the border are not different from customers here, Bigio said, and the solution they are deploying is well established. “We’re dealing with a very mature market, a very large market, [and] a very experienced customer.”

Last year, Quovim forged a partnership with Rogers Communications to help it provide advanced cloud-based contact centre solution to its clients, dubbed Virtual Contact Centre, which has been sold to 20 clients in Canada, according to Bigio. He said Quovim has expanded its relationship with Rogers since then, and is the go-to partner for implementing Interactive Intelligence.

Contact centre technologies have dramatically evolved thanks in part to the cloud. Bigio said customers now have the option of incurring the capital expense of acquiring the technology, a fully-hosted model from Quovim or a pure cloud deployment managed by Quovim. Multi-channel functionality is one innovation that is really opening up new possibilities for contact centre operators, as agents now handle e-mail and chat communications from customers.

Bigio said it’s becoming increasingly important for customers to have more concentrated desktop space for their customer centres and integration with other software, such as CRM. “Before it was a huge investment,” he said. “Now screen CIT can be done in matter of days. It’s all software-based, and open APIs. The end result is an agent is more empowered and they have fewer screens to navigate through. They are able to give better customer service.”

Gary Hilson is a Toronto-based freelance writer who has written thousands of words for print and pixel in publications across North America. His areas of interest and expertise include software, enterprise and networking technology, memory systems, green energy, sustainable transportation, and research and education. His articles have been published by EE Times, SolarEnergy.Net, Network Computing, InformationWeek, Computing Canada, Computer Dealer News, Toronto Business Times and the Ottawa Citizen, among others.